Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by TulliusCicero on Monday February 15, 2021 @11:33AM (#26144244)

> At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night.

How is it possible for heating devices to be less efficient? Where does the waste energy go?

Normally, waste energy in devices powered by electricity means it's lost to heat, but here it would be lost to...?

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by _whiteCaps_ on Monday February 15, 2021 @11:42AM (#26144319)

https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/241-heat-pumps-and...

Heat pumps use a small amount of energy to move thermal energy, but it's much more efficient than resistive heat. But if they can't move enough heat, they fall back to resistive heat to top it up.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by TulliusCicero on Monday February 15, 2021 @11:52AM (#26144426)

Ohhhh, interesting. Right, that makes sense.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by joelwilliamson on Monday February 15, 2021 @11:44AM (#26144342)

There's no waste heat with resistive heating, but heat pumps use electricity to move heat from outside to inside, and they can add more than 1J of heat using 1J of electricity.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by TFortunato on Monday February 15, 2021 @11:46AM (#26144361)

The trick here is that with heat pumps, they aren't generating the heat, just moving it. As such, you can have, e.g. a 1 kW heat pump moving much more than 1 kW of heat. Wheras with a resistive heater, the best you can do is turn 1 kW of electric power into 1 kW of heat output.

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